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Compass is a voyage at many levels: through music and text, with images evoking the freshness of sea air and the colours of wildflowers. A voyage through polar extreme of jazz – from Chick Corea to Sun Ra, through folk song in the slipstream of Luciano Berio, through poetry of James Joyce and William Carlos Williams.

Also a journey through subtly undulating chamber music, improvised and otherwise. Through it all, Susanne Abbuehl’s cool, undemonstrative-yetstrangely- mesmeric voice is the unifying factor. She sings and speaks and whispers directly into the listener’s ear: an intimate, ‘interior’ voice, singing like thinking aloud. Recorded 2003 and 2004.

The combination of Paul Motian and Charlie Haden was always a guarantee for magical improvisational interaction, and there is much of it in this attractive line-up with the twinned guitars of Sam Brown and Paul Metzke and Carlos Ward’s alto sax.

Motian and Haden had previously collaborated with Brown on Keith Jarrett’s Expectations album and on Carla Bley’s Escalator Over The Hill, and the bassist and drummer had also worked with Carlos Ward on Don Cherry’s Relativity Suite. Paul Metzke joined up with Motian after stints with Gato Barbieri’s band and Tony Wiliams’s Lifetime. The team moves sensitively through Motian’s tunes, Haden’s “Song for Che”, and Ornette Coleman’s “War Orphans”.

Down Beat: “A landmark in the career of an outstanding percussionist… 5 Stars”. Recorded 1974.

Steve Kuhn was already a player of legendary repute by the time he came to ECM in 1975. Fifteen years earlier he had been the original pianist in Coltrane’s first quartet. Influential work with Art Farmer and Stan Getz followed, and Kuhn’s own October Suite collaboration with Gary McFarland had established benchmarks for an emergent “chamber jazz”.

With Trance, Kuhn had rich experience to draw upon. “Trance is as unpredictable as it is compelling,” declared All About Jazz., while the BBC Music Magazine noted that “you could scarcely ask for a more powerful yet responsive support team” than Swallow, DeJohnette and Evans: “Kuhn is prompted into some of his most direct, open and lyrical playing.”

After leaving Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band trombonist Julian Priester and synthesizer pioneer Dr Patrick Gleeson put together this now-legendary album in two sessions in 1973.

Extending the experiments of the Hancock sextet this music can also be related to Miles Davis’s robust Afro-funk-slanted electric group music of the period. Pumping bass ostinati, riffs and a big ‘tribal’ beat connect Love, Love to the music of Sly Stone and Funkadelic as well, while the shifting clouds of spacey improvising can also make a listener think of minimal music or Sun Ra. More than 40 years later this slice of proto-cyberfunk is still thoroughly enjoyable and timely.

Recorded live at Boston’s Nightstage club in 1988 this album found John Abercrombie both pushing sonic boundaries on guitar synthesizer and, on regular jazz guitar, deepening his relationship to the world of standards. In this trio he had exceptional improvisational support from bass and drums.

Marc Johnson has said this band was the first that felt “like home” to him after the final Bill Evans Trio. And Peter Erskine was rechannelling Weather Report ideas about soloing inside the structures in this more intimate context.

“I’m extremely happy about this record”, Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava told All About Jazz. “I think it’s by far the best record I ever made. Everybody on the record sounds beautiful.”

The disc bears out the judgement of the Jazzpar Prize jury who had elected Rava Musician of the Year a few months prior to this 2003 recording. “Rava’s bittersweet music does not fit neatly into any one genre. He can play fiery and lyrical lines and he can generate romantic atmospheres. He may shift between abstraction and structure, but he mostly plays the trumpet with a warm, mellow sound – smooth and intoxicating.” Enrico is also an insightful
bandleader, and Easy Living alerted a wider audience to the talents of pianist Stefano Bollani and trombonist Gianluca Petrella.

Gary Peacock’s recordings of the 1980s are production projects on which great players convened to play the bassist’s tunes. And the bass is fully a lead voice here, with title piece Guamba a Peacock solo to open the proceedings. As Paul Bley once said, “Gary is one of those rare musicians you could always count on to play better than you.”

Nonetheless, there are mighty contributions from saxophone, trumpet and drums, with Jan Garbarek in particularly strong form. Jazz Forum: “Garbarek plays with magisterial power here.” Recorded 1987.

The modestly titled Cello has a cover image by Jean-Luc Godard and much of the music featured here gradually made its way into the great director’s films.

This music paints images in the mind. Blogger Tyran Grillo wrote that “David Darling’s Cello is one of the most stunning albums ever to be released on ECM in any genre. Its fluid paths feel like home. Darling plows the improvisatory depths of his soul, given free rein in the studio to paint the negative spaces in between those clouds on the album’s cover, ever deeper, ever truer
to the core of something alive.” Recorded 1991 and 1992.

“The phenomenal strength of Dave Holland’s bass pushes Steve Coleman and Jack DeJohnette into their most powerful work to date,” opined the Sydney Morning Herald. “The subtlety of Coleman’s inflections, the poise and complexity of his lines, are at the service of a very deep musical
feeling. He is the best altoist to have emerged in a long time.” Recorded 1988.

Comments Off on Bennie Maupin – The Jewel In The Lotus (ECM Touchstone) CD

Part of the Touchstone series

Bennie Maupin has been an inventive contributor to iconic records including Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi and Headhunters and Marion Brown’s Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun.

His recordings under his own name have been infrequent but his leader debut,
is indeed a jewel. “A more selfless album is hard to imagine”, said Down Beat in 1975. “On The Jewel In The Lotus, the sound is supreme, and all the players strive to achieve a thorough blending”. Recorded in New York in 1974, the disc’s personnel is drawn from the circle around Herbie Hancock in the period, but the music has a character all its own.